The Sunday Papers

Sundays are for rest. By which I mean playing the rest of the games you meant to get around to this week.

• This is one of the best pieces on the state of gaming I've read in a long time. Helen Lewis explains why she can still enjoy games while identifying them as problemetic. "If we rejected every creative work that is in some way "problematic", the canonical cupboard would be bare." Just, you know, don't read the comments.
• Talking of not reading the comments, aged science magazine Popular Science has decided to switch off the comments from their website. The reason? Science. "But even a fractious minority wields enough power to skew a reader's perception of a story, recent research suggests... If you carry out those results to their logical end--commenters shape public opinion; public opinion shapes public policy; public policy shapes how and whether and what research gets funded--you start to see why we feel compelled to hit the "off" switch."
• Paradox are a bunch of weirdos. Damned refreshing weirdos. That's my takeaway message from Paul Dean's Eurogamer piece on the peculiarities of the publisher/developer. '"Why lie to people?" he asks, as if the idea is incredulous. "People are always going to find out if you lie, always. In the long run, if you keep lying, if you keep hiding stuff, people will find out."'
• Jacqueline Cottrell of The Jace Hall Show thought it might be an idea to speak to women in the US armed forces about how they feel about their portrayal in videogames. "In my time serving, you always come across new recruits who think they can actually serve just because they play shooting games at home “all the time”. These same recruits never make it past their second week of basic."
• $20 million. That's how much Chris Roberts has raised so far for Star Citizen. He explains to Gama's Christian Nutt how he achieved this, and why this means he's avoiding publishers. "People have always been like, 'We want you to come back and do it,' but it's always like, then you become part of the machine again. So I was always wanting to do this, but I want to do it on my own terms."
• Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs is pretty gruesome. But not nearly as gruesome as some of the scenes that were cut. Killscreen's Jason Johnson spoke to writer Dan Pinchbeck to learn what didn't make it in. "There was a pig fucking a dead body. The problem was it just looked like the pig was raping someone."
• I'm so glad someone wrote this story. Kotaku's Jason Schreier spoke to former LucasArts employees over five months to learn why and how the company fell apart. It's a superb piece, revealing the failure of management, and weirdly, the dysfunctional interference of George Lucas himself. “One of the problems of working in a film company—[Lucas] is used to being able to change his mind,” said one source. “He didn’t really have a capacity for understanding how damaging and difficult to deal with these changes were.”

Some music? I'm seeing The Mountain Goats in a week, so I feel it's only appropriate to link back to a favourite.